Well, it'll be about another day before the Anime encoding community attempts to entirely switch to this and two days before XBMC users start going 'Why can't XBMC play this!?'.

No - first we'll spend a few months trying (unsuccessfully) to convince the subbers not to switch over to something that only people who watch anime on their 8-core gaming machines can play back.

Then we'll start agitating for XBMC to incorporate it into the nightly builds as soon as possible after Gotham is released, all the while realising that our quiet HTPCs will never be able to play h.265 and desperately hoping that Handbrake will support transcoding h.265 to h.264 sometime soon so we'll have a stopgap way to watch the releases until video cards that support h.265 are released in 3 years.

Well, it'll be about another day before the Anime encoding community attempts to entirely switch to this and two days before XBMC users start going 'Why can't XBMC play this!?'.

No - first we'll spend a few months trying (unsuccessfully) to convince the subbers not to switch over to something that only people who watch anime on their 8-core gaming machines can play back.

Then we'll start agitating for XBMC to incorporate it into the nightly builds as soon as possible after Gotham is released, all the while realising that our quiet HTPCs will never be able to play h.265 and desperately hoping that Handbrake will support transcoding h.265 to h.264 sometime soon so we'll have a stopgap way to watch the releases until video cards that support h.265 are released in 3 years.

And I thought I was the only one here who realised that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it...

Of course there was a point when h.264 was clearly the better choice, but there were still people who wanted to play videos on their fantastic divx DVD players...

I wonder when we will get to a point when h.265 is the obvious preferable choice but those of us with vdpau capable machines will be hanging on to h.264. (At that point I expect that 2 of the 3 kids will be left home and we'll need less media machines in the house!)

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When people talked about requirements for software decoding of 1080p H.264 back in the day it was always 'worst case scenario' ie very high bitrate 40Mbps Bluray content (in the days before Hi10p). Lower bitrates were proportionally easier to decode.

With HEVC this high bitrate scenario won't exist until 4K becomes a reality. People will be encoding at 1080p HEVC in the range of about 4-7Mbps. In my tests this is actually pretty easy to software decode. You won't be doing it on an Atom of course, or an ARM box.

But a decently clocked i3 upwards should manage it albeit with high CPU utilisation - I know a lot of people will go 'wah wah, high CPU utilisation is evil' but back in the early days of H.264 this was the norm.

By the time HEVC is in widespread use, this type of CPU power will be trivial and HEVC decoding will be standard on new GPUs anyway.

Still its only a matter of time when the people yell for that.
I'am mainly using XBMC for watching anime and the encoders are not sane. It had no sense to switch to Hi10p and I'am convienced that is will make no sense to switch to HEVC other than having smaller files. But I prefer playable files over smaller files.

When the madness starts I hope the nightly build will fast get HEVC added for all of us doomed people who than are in need of this.

(2013-10-31 08:25)Sesshoumaru Wrote: It had no sense to switch to Hi10p and I'am convienced that is will make no sense to switch to HEVC other than having smaller files. But I prefer playable files over smaller files.

When the madness starts I hope the nightly build will fast get HEVC added for all of us doomed people who than are in need of this.

It made no sense to switch to Hi10p because it was never intended as a consumer playback format and thus no hardware decoding was ever planned. And the compression gains in exchange for totally breaking compatibility were not really that significant.

HEVC meanwhile is intended as a consumer playback format so this hardware support will come eventually. And the compression gains are very worthwile.

Away from possibly the anime community, there is not going to be a sudden shift to HEVC so I would not worry about 'madness' just yet. There will be a slow shift to it and H.264 will be the main format for many years to come.

(2013-10-30 09:14)magao Wrote: Then we'll start agitating for XBMC to incorporate it into the nightly builds as soon as possible after Gotham is released, all the while realising that our quiet HTPCs will never be able to play h.265 and desperately hoping that Handbrake will support transcoding h.265 to h.264 sometime soon so we'll have a stopgap way to watch the releases until video cards that support h.265 are released in 3 years.

My box is an A8-3870K for EXACTLY this reason. Only 4k HEVC has me worried about CPU usage.